What John Law Taught Us About the Perils of Printing Money

4 Comments In the same year that the Bank of England was created – 1694 – John Law became a fugitive. He killed a man in a duel, was thrown in prison awaiting execution, and escaped to Europe. After some years of gambling his way through the European courts and writing surprisingly prescient texts on monetary economics he landed in France. One of history’s first grand experiments with unbacked paper money was about to begin. Law’s monetary extravagance between 1715 and 1720 was not simply a Ponzi scheme by a monetary quack, but — at least initially — a […]

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